Summary
Kimberly Braun describes childhood mystical experiences, healing gifts, and a crisis over how to reconcile spiritual life with human passion. She explains how a liberating experience and encounters with Carmelite mystics led her toward contemplative monastic life and deeper trust in the unknown.
Questions This Interview Explores
- What can early mystical experiences reveal about a person’s spiritual path?
- How can someone reconcile deep spirituality with passion, desire, and ordinary human life?
- What is the spiritual purpose of a dark night or profound inner crisis?
- How can uncertainty and the unknown become part of genuine spiritual growth?
- How does a person recognize an authentic calling to contemplative life?
Key takeaways
- Childhood openness can allow timeless joy, intuitive knowing, and a sense of life’s deeper meaning.
- A dark night may dissolve false identities rather than yield to intellectual solutions.
- Spirituality does not require rejecting healthy human passion and desire.
- Love can loosen fear and the need to cling to rigid beliefs.
- Mystical experiences need grounding, patience, and wise spiritual companionship.
- A genuine calling may feel like an inner movement that unfolds naturally rather than a calculated choice.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. Sometimes I call them conversations because people wonder why I talk so much and if it’s just an interview. So, it’s a conversation. In fact, Irene has a laminated paper here that she holds up from time to time and says, “You’re talking too much.” Anyway, here we are.
This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on every page. I’ve done well over 400 of these now, and if you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu. My guest today is Kimberly Braun. Kimberly is a minister. She has an MA in theology, I believe, right?
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rick: CSP, what’s that?
Kimberly: Certified Speaking Professional. It’s an honorary certification through the NSA for my years of public speaking and inspirational talks.
Rick: NSA is the National Security…
Kimberly: I know, isn’t that funny? The National Speaking Association.
Rick: Oh, the Speaking Association, okay.
Kimberly: They talked about changing that.
Rick: Yeah, you wonder. And you’re a meditation coach, and you have been impelled from within by your contemplative experiences from the age of five. Over ten of your years were spent as a Carmelite monastic nun. Just skipping along here. Okay, we’ll cover some more of this as we go through the interview.
So, it’s funny, I was reading your book about your time as a Carmelite nun, and I was reading about burning the potatoes, kissing the floor, cross-country skiing out to the compost pit, and things like that. And I said, “The book’s almost over. When is she going to leave this convent?” Then I got to the end and realized, “Oh, it’s a trilogy. I just read the first part.”
Kimberly: Yes, I know. Some people feel really teased by that.
Rick: Yeah. So, we’ll have to get into the whole story here. We’ll have to do the… Who’s that guy who used to say, “Now you know the rest of the story”?
Kimberly: Yes, I will reveal some of the story.
Rick: All right, we’ll see how much we can tease out of you. In any case, you mentioned you started having profound mystical experiences from the age of five. So, let’s start there. What were some of your earliest recollections of profound spiritual experiences?
Kimberly: Right. I think that children—and I would include myself in that—are experiencing more of a merging in the joy of just being alive. There’s an innocence and an openness. So, in that way, I think that a lot of what I was experiencing isn’t incredibly unique.
But what I can point to that seems to be notable is that I would oftentimes find myself in these incredible states of joy. They would occur in ritual, because I grew up Catholic, which was very powerful for me. They would happen out in nature. They would happen in the simplest things within my family, and time would seem to stop.
It’s difficult to put words to it, because as time seemed to stop, from within and without, everything would move into this very timeless place. There would be a knowing, but it was a knowing without my mind. It was what I would really call a state of deep bliss, and it was very informative.
It’s difficult to put words to it, because as time seemed to stop, from within and without, everything would move into this very timeless place. There would be a knowing, but it was a knowing without my mind. It was what I would really call a state of deep bliss, and it was very informative.
I would always come out of those instances. Sometimes they would last just for a couple of minutes, and sometimes they would last for long periods, like a half hour. They escalated in my late teens to many hours. But back then, when I was little, I would always walk out of them, and there was this incredible excitement of feeling like I knew what life was about.
It gave me a lot of meaning, a lot of purpose, and a lot of direction. It has been both a wind in my sails and a rudder that I’ve never actually been able to move away from. So, even in my dark moments, it’s always been in the framework of those existential experiences.
“It has been both a wind in my sails and a rudder that I’ve never actually been able to move away from.”
Rick: Nice. Well, a lot of little kids actually do have pretty profound experiences, but I think there might be a correlation—I think I may have seen a correlation in all the people I’ve interviewed—between having really profound experiences as a young child, such as seeing angels or unity consciousness or something like that, and a later awakening in one’s twenties or thirties or whatever, later on in life.
It seems that the people who have a profound spiritual shift very often have more extraordinary, pronounced spiritual experiences when they’re little.
Kimberly: I would believe that I was experiencing, from when I was three onward, a sense of the immaterial being as real as the material. I was also experiencing healing gifts through me.
My mom and dad were involved in a charismatic movement that was very grassroots: the laying on of hands and praying in tongues. There was a sense of openness to possibility and potential in our family, and they were so rooted in their own genuineness toward truth and kindness that I think it set the stage for me as a young child to be tasting these things in myself, to be having them happen within me.
Rick: Yeah, it’s a fortunate birth. There’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna asks Lord Krishna, “Well, what happens if a person is on the path to enlightenment and dies?” Then Krishna says, “Well, they live generally a long period of time in the celestial realms and then they’re born into a pure and illustrious family, or, if they’re really fortunate, into a family of yogis.” So, it seems like there are different degrees of auspiciousness in terms of the birth one can have.
Kimberly: Yeah, I think that plays a big part, and I’m super grateful. I’ve always felt as though even encountering my mom and dad—and, of course, as a child you have the idealistic idea that they’re perfect, and now I know they’re not perfect, but they’re wonderful people—I could feel something bright in their innocence.
Even when I was four years old, I can remember looking at them, and it was a feeling quality of this true seeking. They didn’t sit around and have deep philosophical conversations, and they weren’t doing specific things that would lead to that. It was just in their being. I could see their relationship with themselves and the world, and it let me taste that even more within myself.
It took me a number of years, but I realized the compassion that I was tasting in them was actually the compassion that was within me.
Rick: Right. Yeah, I just want to add one thing to what I said a second ago, which is that there are exceptions to that generality I just made. I’ve interviewed people who were sexually abused as children and had all kinds of horrific things happen, and they actually feel, in retrospect, that, in a roundabout sort of way, that was instrumental in their awakening. It was like the medicine they needed in order to jar them out of whatever they were in and into a deeper seeking of higher knowledge.
Kimberly: Right. I think oftentimes when we experience a “no” within ourselves, it’s because we already have a knowing of the “yes.” One of my systematic theology professors in my seminary training was a brilliant man, and from time to time he would look at us down in the class. He had this mannerism that was really imitable, and he would say, “There’s a fine line between an atheist and a mystic. There is a fine line.”
Mysticism Amid Catholic Seminary Training
Here you are in a very constructed Catholic seminary training, and our training taught us that mysticism blasts open. Our “no’s” that are happening when we’re saying, “It’s not that. No to God, no to that,” are because we’re tasting something of the truth, and we’re simply… It can’t be that, because it’s got to be something else that I’m wired for.
Rick: Interesting. Let’s probe this a little bit more, because I find that interesting: “a fine line between an atheist and a mystic.” I actually really enjoy listening to talks by Sam Harris and some of his atheistic compadres because they’re so darn intelligent. In Sam Harris’s case, he’s like a practicing Buddhist, and he’s done tons of meditation—two years in retreat and all kinds of stuff—and yet he’s an atheist.
I think, “God, look at your hand, buddy. I mean, just look at one cell in it and tell me that there isn’t some incredible intelligence orchestrating this universe.” But also, the very fact of saying one is an atheist seems to me very unscientific, because you’re taking an absolute stance rather than a hypothetical one, which would still be open to experiential exploration.
Kimberly: Yeah, I love that. I love the way that you put that, and I think truly that somebody… The people that I’m speaking to who are atheists are usually ones who have had experiences that are just leading them more into the unknown.
I know that technically that’s not what an atheist is, but most of the atheists who feel that way are really committed. It’s that unknown piece, and in that unknown piece is the dissolution of everything—the dismantling of the constructs that our minds set up that give us an idea of who we are and what life is about.
When all of that is really shaken open, I think that we are then in the Divine embrace.
Rick: But how can they call themselves atheists? Why not agnostics? I mean, isn’t that a bit like saying, “I don’t believe in black holes”? All right, but maybe let’s see what experiential evidence there may be for black holes. So, why can’t God be something that is open to experimental investigation?
Kimberly: Well, I’d be interested in your thoughts. My thought is that, as human beings, we feel more solid when we take a stance. It gives us—even if the security is ill-founded—a little bit of ground to stand on, from which we could perhaps surrender into something a bit more.
I do think a lot of these choices that we’re making around our stances are based on what people think is logic, but I’m convinced they’re emotionally and energetically based, and that has its own line of logic to it.
Rick: Yeah, it’s as if they’re building a sort of superstructure of logic to rationalize the emotional or energetic foundation that underlies it.
Kimberly: That’s where I would stand, if you will, in relation to that. I have an incredible amount of easefulness around the constructs that we set up for these deeper yearnings that go on in our souls.
I feel incredibly blessed that I was broken open within a tradition, and now I’m not within a tradition, as the fruit of surrendering into a construct that was a gateway for my own mystic side, if you will, and the consciousness that I am coming into form.
So, I have this real softness when I hear people land in certain places, even if that landing is just a steppingstone and not the final goal.
Rick: Yeah, as you probably know, a lot of spiritual traditions talk about the value of not knowing. I think in Buddhism there’s a thing called “don’t-know mind” or something like that, because it keeps you in a state of openness. Nisargadatta said that he considers the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity to be hallmarks of spiritual maturity.
Kimberly: Yes, and when we’re comfortable with the pathless path—that there is a path to the pathlessness.
Rick: Well, it’s interesting that we’re taking this little tangent, because I’m definitely not premeditated. We’re just getting into it here. But I was thinking about the comparison perhaps between an ardent atheist and an ardent believer in Jesus or Muhammad or whoever.
It’s like there’s a fundamental similarity to them both, in light of what you said a minute ago, in that they’re holding on to something to assuage some kind of fear or for the sake of some kind of security that they find in their ardency.
Kimberly: I think so, and I think there’s a place for that. I think as human beings it’s a stage, and if I look at the human species, I think we’re a little bit like three-year-olds and four-year-olds. I feel like we’re very young in our development, and to hold on to something in this time-space continuum while we experience that we’re much more than that makes a lot of sense.
And if we can provide opportunities where people can be okay and be accepted for holding on, and be brought to the limit of that comfort zone, and have a direct, dynamic experience of the ineffable and the unknown, then I think that’s what breaks us open. And in really simple terms, in Scripture we have, “It’s love that casts out fear,” and I know that’s a very general statement, but I think “love casts out all fear” is a very succinct and powerful way to put what I just said in bigger terms.
“It’s love that casts out fear.”
Rick: Yeah, that’s good, and I appreciate what you’re saying. I’ve interviewed the head of the Hare Krishna movement twice, just to take an example, and those guys really believe in what they’re into. And I think, fine. Billy Graham just died; he really believed in what he was into. Great. It’s like everybody’s path is appropriate for them at their stage of development, and you don’t yank it away from them.
I’m not meaning to sound wiser and holier than anybody who’s really attached to some perspective. I’m sure I have my attachments, but we grow out of them naturally, and it’s really not anyone’s job to wrest it from them.
Kimberly: I would say that in my own life, even though I don’t think that courage is an operative word, because I’m very much a lover archetype. So if there was kind of an identification with my path, it would be this sensibility that life is a dynamic love relationship unfolding. And so, using my language with that and my construct, I experience it and so I move from it.
I feel like I’m moving from banquet to banquet to banquet, even though externally it looks like I’m going into something and leaving something. But the bigger change for me was, interestingly, leaving the monastery and not staying in the monastery. Because staying in the monastery, I was so caught up in so many ecstatic experiences with God that it was the natural progression to the love affair. You know, when you are head over heels and on fire and your whole life is changing, you’ve just got to have it.
There’s an impelling force there that it doesn’t take courage, it doesn’t take thinking about it, it doesn’t take weighing the options; you’ve just got to do it. And there was the same impelling force in leaving, but it was way more sophisticated and subtle. It was a light illumination and it was, “This is the next step in my love affair.” But externally, it took a lot more courage because the transition was huge to step out on so many levels: emotionally, psychologically, and physically.
Rick: Yeah, well, we’ll take this as an introduction, and we’re going to loop back and build up to the point where you just discussed, because we kind of leaped ahead. I just want to add that I was kind of in a similar situation, where I was in the monastic program in the TM movement for 15 years, although it wasn’t anywhere near as monastic as what you were doing.
But when I decided to leave, it was like people were coming to my door and looking at me with jaws dropping, like, “What in the hell are you doing?” And so there was a certain intuitive knowing that this is what I’ve got to do. But anyway, enough about me.
Kimberly: Exactly the same, right?
Rick: So let’s loop back and talk about how you ended up in a monastery in the first place. Probably there are some steps before that that we want to cover in terms of the kinds of experiences you were having and what led up to the decision to enter the . . . it’s not a monastery, it’s a . . . what is it called?
Kimberly: No, it’s a monastery.
Rick: What’s the other word? The female . . .
Kimberly: Convent.
Rick: Convent?
Kimberly: Yeah, but a convent has a different sensibility of lifestyle. So the Carmelites are eremitical, meaning that they’re devoted to a contemplative lifestyle. Carmelite monastic living is the same for women and men.
And I would say that women oftentimes are living a more monastic lifestyle, whereas a convent will oftentimes involve much more relationship with society.
Rick: Okay, so we left you at five years old having profound, timeless, blissful experiences, but you didn’t join the monastery until you were in your 20s. So, with an appropriate amount of detail, what happened between those two ages?
The dark night and the call to Carmel
Kimberly: Right. Well, my healing gifts and my prayer gifts became larger in junior high school. I began experiencing gifts like the gift of prophecy, the gift of healing through prayer for others. I was having a lot of . . . when I would lie in bed at night, my room would become lit up in all sorts of different ways, and I experienced the presence . . . I’ve always been very close to Jesus and Mary, and so I would experience their presence, angels, loved ones, and a lot of phenomena, if you will, but in a much more tempered way than happened later on.
And then I went through a really big dark night, the darkest night. I’ve had other dark moments, but I went through a really big dark night when I was 16 or 17; it started right around there. And it’s very practical. It was a division inside myself, understanding how I could be passionate and how I could be spiritual. It was a conundrum because I’m very passionate by nature in every way.
I’m passionate about causes, I’m passionate about idealistic thought, I’m passionate about exploring the world, I’m passionate about sex, I’m passionate about . . . I’m just a passionate person. And experiencing that quality in myself plunged me into a real confusion in relationship to God, and I didn’t find any mentors.
Rick: It felt like you were selling out or compromising or something.
Kimberly: It felt like it wasn’t okay to be who I was, and it plunged me kind of into hell because you can’t . . . when you’re in a true dark night, you can’t work it out in your mind. You need to wait for something to be revealed and cultivate, and I didn’t have an understanding through mentorship or anything of how to hold space for myself.
So it was very hard. I developed all sorts of health issues and all sorts of things, and I honestly think that I would have died had I not come through it. It was very dramatic.
Rick: You were just really struggling.
Very much. And then I had this moment that was completely out of body, and I experienced a state of freedom that I can’t put into words. And that freedom dissolved all the identities around all these different things.
Kimberly: Very much. And then I had this moment that was completely out of body, and I experienced a state of freedom that I can’t put into words. And that freedom dissolved all the identities around all these different things.
But again, it didn’t happen in my mind. If it was based anywhere, it was very, very heart-centered. There was an experience of freedom in that I could be here, I could not be here; none of it mattered, and I was utterly free to live. And in that moment, that whole dilemma went away. It’s never resurfaced.
“There was an experience of freedom in that I could be here, I could not be here; none of it mattered, and I was utterly free to live.”
And a part of my practical knowing is to be spiritual, to be a living desire of consciousness. At our very center is Eros, and if we are the desire of God, we are also its fulfillment. And so, to live a life that is, in the healthiest sense of the word, from that soul desire, then we become who we’re meant to be.
So that’s a lot of language around something that was not . . . I wouldn’t talk about it that way at the time. But after that moment, wow, I was knocked off my butt. I mean, it was like being pursued by God. The heat and the heaviness—I couldn’t get enough time in solitude. And then even when I was with people, the spirits, being what they were, would appear to me. Everything I was doing was this experience of Christ and Christ consciousness, and I was changing and maturing in it in dramatic ways.
I would spend hours and hours lost in these states, and it had a lot . . . they were different each time, so I won’t give a lot of language to what they were like, but they were incredible, and it was impossible to do anything other than surrender into this.
And that went on from when I was 19 to about six months before I entered the monastery. I was trying to find a spiritual director out in California, and I couldn’t find anybody because I came off, I think, as too ordinary for all this to be happening. And so the mature people that I was turning to were disbelieving.
Rick: They thought maybe you just had a vivid imagination or something.
Kimberly: Yeah. One guy thought I was falling asleep. I would swoon; my body couldn’t always sustain it. It was a very Teresa of Avila-type of experience, and that was his question to me, because I would take a step and then I was completely swooning, taken up for these long periods. And he’s like, “Now, are you sure you aren’t falling asleep?”
Rick: Yeah. And did Teresa have that kind of experience too?
Kimberly: Yes. And that’s where I found my friend, because I gave up on trying to find any human community to talk to about it. And I was nervous anyway, because I felt . . . at that time in my life, I felt very unworthy and humbled and undone. So I was scared to talk about it all, because I was like, “Who am I?”
That feeling doesn’t exist in me anymore, because I feel that we are all pulsing that, and so my relationship to it is all different. But I gave up, and one of my roommates, a week later after I totally gave up, put Teresa of Avila’s autobiography of her life in my hands.
I sat down and started reading it, and I was weeping because everything she was describing was happening to me. And even around that time, I had a bilocation experience because someone was in need of prayer. I was having all of this, and all of this was happening.
Rick: So tell us about that. You were sitting in your room or something, and you also showed up somewhere else, observable to other people?
Kimberly: Yes. There was this little girl; she was an Oriental girl. I can’t quite describe it. I shared it with a spiritual friend who knew it was true, and all I can say was that I was hot, and everything was etheric-like. And then I was where I was, and then I was with this girl. She was really in anguish. Something had happened that upset her, and I did not know what that was.
Rick: Did she see you, or did you just see her?
Kimberly: No, she felt the support.
Rick: She felt it, but did she actually see you sitting there, and later on she saw you?
Kimberly: She recognized me, well, I never saw her again.
Rick: Oh, I see.
Kimberly: Yeah, because I went somewhere.
Rick: So a subtle body, something or other happened and you . . .
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah. And she was consoled by that experience, and then once that encounter was over, I was clearly just in my room. So I was having a lot of things happen.
Rick: A lot of stuff going on.
Kimberly: Yeah, a lot of stuff. So I found refuge in Teresa of Avila, and even though I grew up Catholic, I really didn’t know about the Carmelites. And then shortly after that, somebody put Teresa of Lisieux’s book in my hands, and then I discovered John of the Cross. There was a visceral knowing that these were my really close friends.
So I began to grow in friendship with them, and as that happened, it made it really simple to join the monastery. And the right monastery came about. It took a long time. I really wanted to go fast, and it was meant to go slowly.
Rick: Do you know Frances Bennett by any chance?
Kimberly: Yes.
Rick: Okay, so I just got a question here from Frances. She says, “I had an amazingly similar background experience as you: deep mystical stuff as a child, entering monastic life in my 20s, dark night in my late teens. I have come to feel very strongly that a lot of my deep spiritual interest coming at such an early age with such intensity, and then entering monastic life, was due to spiritual practice interest in previous lives. Have you come to that conclusion as well, Kimberly?”
Kimberly: That’s a really great question. I would say that there has been an earnestness in my search. When I’ve experienced other past lives, there have been elements of that. I travel lightly in the past-life view, so I think it’s very true as a plane of consciousness to understand our evolution into form. So I think there is that thread happening, and I have found myself tracing back to Goddess experiences, to energetically vibrating Kuan Yin and vibrating Kali. So I even think that vibrational signature has been more leading and formative to me in this life than even some of my past lives.
Rick: Kundalini experts that I’ve interviewed have said that Kundalini can awaken over the course of several lifetimes. So it can awaken in one life, and then you die, and when you come into the next life, it’s already awakened to that degree. Then it just kind of . . . they sometimes refer to it as “she” continuing the progress that picked up from where it left off.
Kimberly: I love that.
Rick: When you say all this energetic stuff going on, with huge surges of energy and this and that, that’s kind of what it sounds like.
Kimberly: It does. What I was experiencing was more than a rising. I know in traditional energetic constructs there’s a rising through the spine up into enlightenment, into the mind. It’s interesting: my experiences in my late teens felt like somebody was cracking my head open in a joyful way, and it would go like this, and then I’d be flooded from my crown chakra down. And then the outflow was that the health of my mind, body, and heart increased as the fruit of what was happening here, versus some of the other energy movements that happened.
I think they’re all just different pathways, and I think our personalities and our cultures, and the fact that we have something of a collective consciousness, set us up. The real invitation is our saying “yes” to becoming consciousness in its full form.
Rick: Yeah. Based on what you just said, I want to read something that somebody sent me in an email this week: “The difference between the yogic path, where the consciousness prepares the body as it moves up the spine, hopefully culminating in a Shiva-Shakti reunion, and the mature Vedantic path, where the energy comes down the mountain from the head to the heart, to the aura or gut, to rest in being. Two vastly different movements, which is why not all yogis become jnanis. Some stay up and play in the field of consciousness. It’s not automatic that they will return to the body.” Interesting.
Kimberly: Very interesting. We all have our challenges. First, I want to thank you, Frances, for that question, and I bow to your experiences. I would say, if I haven’t had any challenge, I’ve wondered if I just wouldn’t do more good not being here in this world, you know. So I mean, I know I’m meant to be here. There’s no question.
Rick: Yeah, because you’re here.
Kimberly: Because I’m here.
Rick: That’s proof.
Kimberly: Right, but that has been my bigger challenge, you know.
Rick: Feeling like you didn’t belong in this God-forsaken realm or something.
Kimberly: No, I’m part and parcel human, but there was that sense of really landing, really like, “Ah, I have to be here.” Because if we are very subtle in who and what we are, sometimes I’ve wondered, “Well, you know, couldn’t I do greater good just not being in the body anymore?”
Rick: Yeah, it reminds me of an old Stephen Wright joke. He had this deadpan way of speaking. He said, “I broke up with my girlfriend. I wasn’t really into meditation, and she wasn’t really into being alive.”
Kimberly: Well, I had a great consolation. In 2007, I was straddling—I was still Catholic and I was . . . get this . . . I was on the ministerial staff at a church with two Carmelite priests who really esteemed me as a fellow minister, even though I wasn’t a priest. And so there was great collegiality there, but I was also keenly aware that my experience crossed all different boundaries. It was so universal.
If I could learn to hear the heart of every person before me, I would feel that I had become more skilled in who I’m meant to be. So my language morphs and shapeshifts to be at the service of others. I was beginning to straddle being on the ministry staff and doing things out in the local community, and starting to lead retreats that were much more universal and essence-based. And as I was doing that, I experienced my mind . . . I just lost my train of thought.
Rick: Just now?
Kimberly: Just now.
Rick: Oh, well, you’re talking about how, back in 2007, you were serving in a ministerial capacity, and you were becoming more ecumenical, I think—more multifaceted and growing out of just the one channel you had been living in—and . . . I don’t know, am I jogging your memory?
Kimberly: Non-dual Tantra, non-dual Tantra. I found that my Christian mysticism was expressed very well in the writings that I was finding through non-dual Tantra.
Rick: Like Kashmir Shaivism kind of thing?
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah. And that broadened my language out, but it gave me honey, because for the mystics, and in how I can read them and experience them and feel at home, that was giving me a practical articulation of the nature of reality and ourselves as both the revealing of awareness and the concealment that’s still in the process of revealing. The notion that in the end God will be all in all. Teilhard de Chardin’s notion that there is this pulsing Omega Point and everything is returning in that Christ consciousness.
Concealment and Revelation in Manifestation
Rick: Yeah, there are many ways we can go right now, but I’m thinking that there has to be concealment in order for there to be revealing. Otherwise . . . and I would go so far as to say there has to be concealment in order for there to be a universe. Somehow the very process of manifestation necessitates concealment, and so there’s this hide-and-seek game going on, you know, where things get concealed and then forms eventually evolve that are sophisticated enough to break through the concealment and arrive back at that T. S. Eliot quote about arriving back from whence we started and knowing the place for the first time.
Kimberly: Yes, the ever-ancient, ever-new. There’s a . . . speaking to that, and I think what I love about the sophistication of that system—and I would consider myself very much a beginner, so I’m going to lead a Tantra of Christ workshop soon as a way of exploring some of these texts side by side—but what I love about it is that it challenges us to move away from this way we want to judge ourselves and reality. It takes great strength and vulnerability to truly move away from the right-and-wrong way of looking: I’m bad, I’m good; this is right, this is wrong; that is light, that is dark.
When we’re willing to be vulnerable enough to say, “Ah, consciousness might be showing up in concealment and in revealing, and that’s part of the process. How can I assent to that?” that takes a lot of courage.
Rick: Yeah, but . . . well, firstly, as a footnote on this Kashmir Shaivism point, my interviews with Paul Mueller-Ortega and Igor Kufayev would be good references for those interested in Kashmir Shaivism.
Just this morning I received an email from somebody about Pema Chödrön’s—I would say, I haven’t even read the whole article yet—rationalization of Trungpa Rinpoche’s behavior, which involved excessive drinking and sexual promiscuity and so on. Quite often this stuff is rationalized as crazy wisdom or just sort of, I don’t know, living the fullness of life or something like that. But I think it’s often a rationalization, and I tend to regard such people as half-baked.
I don’t know whether you’re alluding to that kind of thing or not, but one just has to temper this notion of experiencing everything in the name of living life fully with some sort of moral or ethical values, I think.
Kimberly: Yeah, and I’m not sure I feel qualified to speak to that—the behavior and all of that. I think the real litmus test is: Is there dissipation of energy happening, or is there magnification of energy happening?
Rick: In one’s own experience, you mean?
Kimberly: Yeah. And is there an expansion? Because if we’re a scale-expanding cosmos, then I believe that the human being is meant to expand within it.
But the concealment—I think what I’m speaking to is, let’s take this notion. This is a really simple one. Very popular in Christian circles is the admonition that it’s better to give than to receive. Well, that can sometimes be used in the context of contracting the human being, to feel guilty if they actually participate in the receiving part of things.
You know, it sets up a moral standard that has a black-and-white quality to it, instead of recognizing that there’s a dance and that the concealment part is the human being being vulnerable enough to ask the deeper question, “What’s at the service of the soul’s desire here?”
So that’s a bit more of what I’m speaking to: We don’t know ourselves, and we don’t really know the universe. When we’re willing to hold that and ask hard questions so that more can be revealed, then more becomes expansive, and we’re living from a soul-desire place. We’re living from a place that’s aligned with morality and ethics and things like that.
Rick: Yeah, there are several things I think you just said. One is that morality and ethics can be codified, and one can try to live by “the book says this, therefore I should do that.” But it also can become a thing where one is in tune with cosmic intelligence, if you want to use that phrase, and acting according to its dictates spontaneously, which may or may not appear to correlate with what the books say, but which you know in your heart of hearts is the right course to take.
Kimberly: Yes, and that’s a very dynamic way, I think, to show up as consciousness in this world. I think it’s living that dynamic life that gives that soft interplay between concealment and reveal.
I love in Psalm 19—I’m paraphrasing, it’s lines 3 and 4—but the first phrases are, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.” And it’s 3 and 4: “Day unto day tells the story, and night unto night reveals the message.”
So if we look at our lives as an ever-flowing day and night, or, in Kali terms, if we look at our lives as conception, birth, living, and destruction, if we have these movements and these cycles, there’s something always going on there in the divine unfolding.
Often the concealment moments—the dark nights of our souls, when we’re sitting in doubt, when we’ve got confusion—if we can potently hold that vigil candle, figuratively, in those moments, then we can trust that it will be revealed, that the illumination will happen.
Rick: So, in other words, something good is happening. Keep that in mind.
Kimberly: Yes, thanks for making that really simple. I’m like, you talk a lot. My dad said to tell you, he said, “Don’t ask her to tell you how the camera works, because you’re going to get the history of cameras.”
Rick: That’s funny. And, you know, on this whole point about ethics and this and that, I just want to say, there’s that phrase, “What would Jesus do?” And my response to that was, well, you kind of have to be Jesus to know that. If you’re not Jesus, then you’re only going to be able to do what you do and what you can do, given your level of consciousness, your level of development. It’s hard to emulate a higher level of consciousness. I mean, even just as it’s hard to—I don’t know, I can’t ski like Lindsey Vonn. You have to be Lindsey Vonn to ski like that, having had that development.
Kimberly: Right, right, and if we can bring a respect into what’s most helpful for each human being and for ourselves in the moment, then I feel that we’re being wise.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. Another thought that comes to mind here is that, talking about dark nights and this and that, I kind of feel this might tie into the notion of free will. You know, some people say we don’t have any whatsoever. My impression is that we do, but there’s a certain—out of the whole spectrum of possibilities, we occupy a certain portion of it, and there’s a certain amount of wiggle room within that spectrum where we can kind of guide it this way with our intention, and if we do, we gain greater freedom. Or we can guide it that way with our intention by doing certain things, and if we do, then we diminish our freedom; we become even more bound and lost. Would you concur with that, maybe?
Kimberly: Yeah, I think that’s a nice…
Rick: Not that you need to.
Kimberly: Right, I think that’s an interesting way to put it on a practical level. I love the question. It’s leading me to think of one of the… in the Nataraj, in that statue—and again, I’m not…
Rick: That’s the dancing Shiva.
Kimberly: Anyone’s… the dancing Shiva. You know, one of the acts is the willing, and I feel that when we are truly free, we will seamlessly and effortlessly… So the more we are… we realize ourselves that we’re a soul, and as a soul we’re having this expression, the more we actually realize that in the deep sense of the word, then we free will everything.
It’s like when people feel that they’re participating in the creation process. A lot of people talk about manifestation, and there’s a whole dilemma around the whole… There’s truth to the law of attraction, and there’s a lot of confusion around all of that too.
So I would focus much more on the freedom that, as human beings, we’re meant to be free. When we attend to that personal growth, then all we will comes to be, because all we will is aligned with the force of what we are. And you spoke to it, I think, well in a practical way: we’re participating in that, but we’re not quite wholly there yet.
Rick: Yeah. Well, one interesting direction we could go at this point, with this point, is: if God is omnipresent—let’s take that as an assumption for the moment. If he’s not, then that’s another question: where is he hiding, you know, and how did he manage to not be in some other… in this section of the universe? But if God is omnipresent, then God alone is. And, of course, Vedanta says that kind of thing. If God alone is, then we are that, and Vedanta says that too: Tat tvam asi. And if we are that, then how come we perceive ourselves as being something other than that, as being isolated and individuated? Can we rise to a state in which we know ourselves to be that, and when we do, then what guides the impulses of our individual life?
Kimberly: I love what you just spoke to. If I were to give a definition…
Rick: If there is an individual life anymore.
Kimberly: Right, right. Well, I think that this aspect of form is a celebration of the multifaceted consciousness. So, if I had to give a definition of God, I’ve come to: God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
“God is that whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
Rick: Beautiful.
Kimberly: So in that, I feel that we’re just at the beginning stages of realizing what that even is.
Rick: We as a species?
Kimberly: But it’s there in the consciousness because we’re speaking to it. Oftentimes when we hear it—like when I say that, I feel so much joy run through my body—there’s a coming-home feel. So as we realize it, then why would it not be possible for that which is inevitable and formless to have a celebration in identified, specific objects?
Rick: Yeah.
Kimberly: The construct, the dilemma, is just simply in our mind because we don’t actually realize what that means yet. The conflict doesn’t exist if God is that whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. There’s no conflict there because there is a powerful willing that could have a celebration as identified objects that are in a dance. We’re in a dance right now in our conversation.
God, suffering, and the larger evolutionary picture
Rick: Now, some people might say that sounds kind of airy-fairy or nicey-nicey. What about the Holocaust? What about the Parkland High School shooting and all the horrible things that happen in the world? If it’s all God, how do you explain that stuff?
Kimberly: I am so with you, and it’s devastating. I suppose the presence of God in that is when we as human beings awaken into the atrocious ways we act in the name of some high ideal, and that is God present there. But that a God allowed or willed it, I can’t give an answer to that. I can only speak to the experience that I experience God when compassion becomes embodied.
I can understand the aberration, because our biggest dilemma is our thinking we’re separate, and then the survival thrust that goes into preservation that’s fueled by separation. You know, I need to preserve this; this is for the highest good. At heart, there’s something—even though it’s very demented when it’s acted out in the Holocaust—at heart, the essential movement to want to preserve the highest good is something that’s the noble part of being human. It is just completely deluded because it’s forced by the biggest misunderstanding of all: that there is separation around all of this. So, in a way, that huge devastation, and all of those things, is this shake-up that we’re off track.
Rick: So you may have just answered this question, but maybe you could rephrase your answer. Would you feel comfortable saying that if you could zoom out far enough and have enough wisdom, you could see the evolutionary potential in any situation or event, no matter how horrific?
Kimberly: Yes, I do. And I know that that’s a stance, and I know that I could find myself wrong because life may teach me something different. But yes, at this point, my experience of reality is so much the pulsing-ness of God that I couldn’t say something that would contradict that. I would be contradicting it if I had any other stance right now.
Rick: Yeah, well, it’s interesting because some people lose their faith in God when confronted by terrible things like that. They say, “Well, God couldn’t possibly exist or this wouldn’t happen.” But I would say that, as difficult as it may be, it necessitates a deepening of one’s understanding of what God actually is and a clarification—perhaps a maturation—out of a simplistic notion of some bearded wise guy in the sky to something much more imminent, much more omnipresent in every particle of creation and orchestrating this play. And, like all plays, it has its ups and its downs and its tragedies and its triumphs.
Kimberly: And I think if we believe at essence that we’re eternal, it brings in a whole different world perspective too, and a whole different look at why we’re here, and the reincarnation notions and that. One of the things I really liked about The Shack, you know, the movie that came out and the book—
Rick: I don’t think I saw that, so maybe others haven’t either.
Kimberly: I think it’s Paul William Young. I spoke at a conference. Interestingly, he was a big speaker at a big progressive Christian conference, and I mainly am brought in to speak in non-Christian environments anymore.
Rick: You make the Christians nervous.
Kimberly: I do, but they chose me to speak here too, which I was very honored. But I really appreciate his exploration of this notion of God. I saw him at a Trinity conference too, right next to Cynthia Bourgeault and Richard Rohr. He had The Trinity, so the Trinity is at the force of this book: the relationship of this man in the face of the loss of his daughter, who was abducted, and it’s just terrible.
And the God part—there was a Jesus figure, a spirit figure, and a God figure. The God figure won’t enter into his line of reasoning of, “Why did you let this happen?” And I thought that was really compelling: that Paul represented the formless part of God as, “You’re not speaking my language. I’m here for you. I am a hundred percent here, but you’re just… Until you can speak my language, you’re not going to be able to hear the answer.” And so I think that speaks to what you’re saying.
Rick: In other words, people might try to shoehorn God into a… Cats love to get in boxes, right? We used to have this cat that would try to get herself into this little tiny box, and she couldn’t fit. Every which way she tried, she wouldn’t fit. It was a hilarious thing to watch.
But I think a lot of people try to do that with God. They try to kind of squeeze God into their concept rather than expanding their concept to potentially appreciate—even if one can never fully do so—what God actually is.
Kimberly: Right, right, and you spoke to it with the quote earlier too. I think when our path undoes us and breaks us out of our languaging and our leanings, then I think we are coming into wholeness.
Rick: There’s a question that came in that I think will fit at this point in the interview. Florence from New York asks:
“You mentioned living inspired by spirit. Do you propose to do that through a deep sense of what feels right, or do you do this through direct transmission? I would say that comes through hearing or seeing or knowing through a divine moment. How do you achieve that?”
Kimberly: How do you achieve that? I think achieving that is individual for us. Living inspired by spirit, I would say, is the opening up. Now, this is again operating on my theology, Florence, and I accept that it has some definitions to it. But my experience is that at my very center is spirit.
John of the Cross eventually came to the deduction toward the end of his life. He said, “The soul’s center is God.” Not is like God, or has God, or is experienced, but is God.
Every time we make a choice to open to that experience, it could be through the senses, because we’re sense creatures. It could be through the letting go in our minds. My love is the practice of meditation and contemplative practice. I find silence is the place where we touch, taste, and begin to embody the spirit that’s at our center.
As we do that, our minds become mature in the knowing of how to be open to it moment by moment and how to ask the questions that keep us open. So it’s kind of like this delicate dance that, in the beginning, we’re clunky around, because we’ll have an experience and then we want to hold on to it. We all want to do that. Or we’ll be undone, and we’ll get confused, and we’ll back away from what spirit may be wanting to reveal to us.
So we have this dance, but slowly, over time and in direct proportion to our willingness to surrender into this silence of our being, our intentionality is perhaps the biggest lever that can lead us to that achievement. We are reshaped to discover, taste, touch, and live an inspired life in spirit.
I love involving all the senses. Coming into the silence, I also love experiencing that even in this conversation. I feel like I’m in a matrix of silence, even though we’re having a conversation.
Rick: Sure, yeah. I bet you feel that even when you’re doing something intense. I feel it when I’m playing pickleball, which is this intense, fast-paced, quick-reaction-time sport. It’s partially enjoyable because of the juxtaposition of the silence with the intense activity.
Kimberly: I’ll have to Google pickleball. I’ve never heard of it.
Rick: I’m sure it’s all the rage in Boulder. It looks simple at first, but when you start getting to higher levels of it, it’s very challenging. But anyway, anything like that—the silence in the midst of activities—kind of stirs up a lot of bliss, don’t you think?
Kimberly: It does, and it’s informing. So there is a feeling quality, and I think attending to the fact that it leaves us feeling good is the candy that gives us the courage to surrender even more, so that the parts that are scared or resistant to living a life in spirit can realize it’s safe to do it, and it’s going to end well, and I’m not going to be obliterated as a human being, or I’m not going to be forever alone.
And Florence, you can always connect with me, too, at my website. I have lots of ways. I love building relationship and exploring that question more deeply and being a help, a facilitator.
Rick: Yeah. Now, meditation came naturally to you. You’ve been doing it in a way, one way or another, since you were a child, and I’ve been doing it since the ’60s. If I had been left to conceptualizing as a way of growing into all this, I don’t think I’d still be alive anymore, but I think it would have been very frustrating.
So here’s a question that came in from somebody named Kranti in Baltimore, who said, “I am a beginner in meditation. My practice involves being aware of my thoughts. I have noticed that the effectiveness of a session depends on how active or tired I am, time of day, mood, etc. What is it that is being aware of the thoughts, and why is it affected by those external factors?”
I would say the condition of your nervous system has a lot to do with it, and that has to do with fatigue and all, but go ahead and answer that.
Kimberly: Yeah, that’s really lovely. I mean, that’s a probing question: What is it that is being aware? What is the observer? I have a very experiential way of relating to that.
I have a technique that I teach called essence meditation, and it evolved from my years of ritual, and then studying the anthropological and psychological structures of ritual and realizing the power that can offer support in being prepared for sitting. So those are some things that can be helpful to prepare you to enter into your time of meditation with a bit more readiness.
The observer is interesting because I think the observer is an aspect of ourselves that is present to be the counterpoint to the dance of presence, and in time is the gateway by which we are simply present and there is no more observer.
So I wouldn’t say the observer doesn’t exist. I don’t think that’s very helpful, and that’s a big statement to make. But I do think that the observer is a quality or a faculty within ourselves that we might term higher self.
As the higher self does its role of providing the container for us to grow in presence, eventually those divisions—because it’s I-Thou that’s going on here, I’m observing my thoughts, I’m observing the sensations of my body—eventually the experience of being dissolves even that I-Thou away, and the observer disappears and is no more.
So it’s not that the observer is not incredibly important as a quality of who and what we are.
Rick: Yeah, I want to reiterate what you just said in slightly different words, but I think it’ll be the same point. In answer to Kranti’s question, if you’re observing your thoughts, fine, but then there’s a threefold structure there. There’s the observer, there’s the observed—the thoughts—and then there’s a process of observation by your nervous system, your mind, by which you’re able to experience thoughts.
If you could meditate in such a way that you were to observe a thought, but observe it in its subtler and subtler and subtler impulses, you’ll reach a point at which the thought disappears and that threefold structure disappears as well. All that’s left is pure consciousness without any observation, and that’s what they call samadhi. So you might want to look into the possibility of that.
If you could meditate in such a way that you were to observe a thought, but observe it in its subtler and subtler and subtler impulses, you’ll reach a point at which the thought disappears and that threefold structure disappears as well. All that’s left is pure consciousness without any observation, and that’s what they call samadhi. So you might want to look into the possibility of that.
“All that’s left is pure consciousness without any observation.”
Kimberly: Yeah, and I think the word “allowing” is really operative there. When we observe—
Rick: Effortless.
Kimberly: Yes. When we observe, so often we can come in as an identity. So there’s this stance of observing and allowing all of what you just shared to expand within ourselves. Then there’s the observing that leaves us in a stance of, “Oh, there’s my thought.”
We can tell when we’re creating a rigidity in relation to our meditation and when we’re creating and allowing that which allows the dissolution to happen. That’s a wonderful practice, to take it to that level.
Rick: Yeah, and Kranti was mentioning being tired or the quality of her meditation varying according to what was going on during the day and things like that. I find it helpful to lie down and take a little nap before I meditate in the afternoon, just because then any superficial fatigue that would cloud the process has been eliminated.
But you have to kind of— the body is like a vehicle or an instrument through which this experience, or any experience, can happen, and so the instrument has to be functioning properly for the experience to be clear.
Kimberly: Yeah, and if you’re interested in some tools and techniques that can help with that, just email me. I have a huge toolbox that can offer what might work best for you.
But in addition to that, I think that showing up for meditation has its own power to it. Even when we’re tired, I know it can feel or seem like the quality of the meditation is not as good. We didn’t do as well, or it’s not as good. But I don’t buy that, because I think that ultimately, when we choose to meditate, it is because spirit within us is wanting the experience.
So we may think we’re choosing to take on a practice, but I think it’s a deeper, unconscious consciousness that’s moving us into the practice, and that is where there is faith for me. It’s happening, and it’s not on my shoulders. I participate, but it’s not—ultimately, I’m becoming the power source. I am not the power source there.
Rick: Yeah, that’s very well put. I appreciate that. It’s almost like you don’t do meditation or you don’t do enlightenment. It’s not something you get to by pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. It’s more of a surrendering into a larger intelligence than it is any kind of individual motivation or intention. Would you say?
Kimberly: Right, I definitely think that, yes. And there’s a great— I’m totally paraphrasing this quote, so it’s probably very different from reading it in the book—but I love in Augustine’s Confessions, he says to this effect—because he was a Manichaeist, so he was very big into dualism, into evil being in matter, caught in the material, and light needing to come about through— He had a very sophisticated spirituality, if you will, before he became Christian, and he brought all that into his Christianity, all that dilemma.
But he says this phrase at one point, when he had been really broken open. He said, “Late have I loved you, beauty ever ancient, ever new. Late have I loved you. I ran through the streets shouting for you. I talked about you to everyone. I could not find you, and then you shattered my deafness, and I found that you were already always within.”
“I found that you were already always within.”
Rick: Wow, that’s beautiful.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Rick: It’s really cool. So, let’s get back to your story a little bit. You went through this thing you told us about earlier, and you were really kind of on fire. Then somebody put the St. Teresa book in your hands, and then you read St. John and so on, and then one thing led to the next, and you ended up getting into this monastery and living there for how many years?
Kimberly: Ten and a half years.
Rick: Ten and a half years, and it sounded interesting—lots of good food, it sounded like, to me. I kind of figured you’d be eating dry bread and water, but you guys really laid it on.
Kimberly: You’re right. I mean, we did fast. We really did some big fasts, but, you know, living off the land—
Rick: North Dakota.
Kimberly: North Dakota. There was a celebration of the census. And we farmed the land, and I don’t know that I— I love still to cook, but I don’t know that I’ve eaten so well as I did in North Dakota.
Rick: Yeah, it was kind of mouthwatering reading your book and describing the things you guys cooked.
Kimberly: You’re getting it from a foodie, too, so you’ve got my lens going on there.
Rick: Yeah. One could read your book to find out what it was like living in that monastery. It was very regimented, and you got up at midnight to pray, and you got up early in the morning, and there was a lot of time spent in prayer and meditation.
You can say something more about this if you want, but I want to fast-forward to how and why you left. But do you want to say anything more about what it was like being there before we get to that?
Silence, Community, and Monastic Life
Kimberly: There was something incredibly symphony-like in living in silence. Part of me—the mature and the immature part of me, because we’re always this kind of interplay of both those things going on—rejected this idea of being put in a box. I couldn’t stand it in my late teens: “Don’t put me in a box.” But I also didn’t want to put other people in boxes, and part of my intuitive knowing in that was that once you put someone in a box, you set up a box that needs to be healed and transcended or shattered or changed. I really wanted to challenge myself to live a life that was not being put in boxes or putting people in boxes, and the lifestyle there afforded that because of the amount of silence we lived in.
When you’re left alone with your own thoughts on things, and when you’re opened up to the intuitive, psychic relationship to those around you, it opens up all your senses in a lot of different directions. There was something really, really powerful. There was something very miserable when parts of me that needed to be healed were operative. There’s nothing like a greater hell than being stuck in silence by yourself, and you can’t put a radio on or call a friend.
Rick: Solitary confinement is considered one of the most serious punishments.
Kimberly: I think it’s unethical to ever impose that on somebody, especially somebody—
Rick: Especially someone who has no recourse to inner fulfillment.
Kimberly: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sending them on a meditation retreat is my solution. But then you also open up these other avenues of the Self, capital S. So it was a perfect fit for me and, in all its ups and downs, never ceased to be like a honeymoon for me for the ten and a half years. It was a dramatic series of events that led to my leaving, because I never would have thought of leaving.
Building a permanent monastery
Rick: Yeah. So what was that dramatic series of events?
Kimberly: In short, because my second and my third books, which are written and will be coming out in a little bit, give a really wonderful immersion—
Rick: Right, we give some little teasers for the book.
Kimberly: I’ll give you some teasers, I’ll give you that, right? Because, yes, it’s all the little things that lead us to the big things. Well, I was asked to join a community down in Texas, and the first book ends that way. That community was very small and very different. We were in a converted house, and there were only four other nuns. All four of those nuns were 20 years older than me.
We had to truncate all our ritual. My love was the chant and ritual, but because of what it takes to keep a monastery going, we had to truncate the way we did ritual. So it was beautiful, and in one way it was freer of the amount of discipline in the obedience part. It was much freer in that way. So in that way it was more contemplative, with more breathing space, but in another way it had less structure, less of the gateways into the things that I loved.
About a year into being there—and you can see this in my TEDx talk because I share it there—I was out back and I was really hungering for solitude. With our house on the outskirts of town, we were getting the doorbell rung all the time, and it was beautiful.
Rick: Was it fundamentalist Christians trying to convert you?
Kimberly: No, they were our friends who loved us. It was a largely Hispanic culture, and there were people wanting to bring us things.
Rick: Bring you pies and whatever.
Kimberly: Uh-huh. There were also tons of people coming for prayer. I had some very dramatic prayer experiences with people, but it was more like we were part of the community, whereas North Dakota was really contemplative, where you rarely saw or talked to somebody.
I loved all that community, but I longed for the solitude. I mean, that’s why I became a Carmelite: to have the long hours. I was out back and I had this moment of soul hunger, and it just came up like a fire in me. In that longing for silence and solitude, I heard really clearly, “Build the permanent monastery.”
Because it was an answer that I could feel energetically, I gave a huge yes to it. I’m like, “Yes!” But I had no idea that it meant I was actually going to physically build the monastery. I thought it meant figuratively, like we were saying yes to building it and it was going to give us our lifestyle back. So what ended up happening—
Rick: That’s right, you built a monastery down there, didn’t you? I remember hearing that story. Wow.
Kimberly: Yeah. What happened was, through a series of totally unplanned events, because I was the right-hand person of the leader in that community, I was infused with the know-how to do it all. It was an example of when we say yes to the unknown and we’re given all we need.
My mind was attuned to architecture, to general contracting, to the principles of engineering, to reading blueprints, and to organizing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of product.
Rick: Which you didn’t have any prior experience with—any of this stuff, right?
Kimberly: I had no experience. And so I was the general contractor for this multimillion-dollar project that was happening without formal funding, with our blueprints and everything. As that was happening, I was changing. Gifts within me were being realized that I didn’t know about.
There were ways that my presence was allowing people to experience spirit in themselves, just because I was still a monastic and I was caught in this project, and the flow of the project was so dynamic. In that process, there were a lot of great things like that that happened, and then there was a lot of confusion.
I mean, I was doubted. I was only 29 years old. “Who’s this little girl? How is she doing this? This must be illegal.”
Rick: Child labor.
Kimberly: And so there was a lot of light and dark that happened with that. There were huge shake-ups because it was not according to any of the paradigms of how things are meant to happen.
In all that shake-up, I didn’t know how much I was being changed. Without realizing it, my spirituality was blasted into a mysticism that just didn’t fit that container anymore. I wouldn’t have thought that; it didn’t come to my mind at the time. It wasn’t a reflection I had.
The Inner Illumination That Ended Her Vows
What led me to leave was that I was in my hermitage one night and I had this rush of spirit, an inner illumination. Oh, Rick, it was incredible. In it, I was washed of my vows. Again, it had nothing to do with logic.
I was walking around, and I knew what it felt like to be Carmelite. I was walking around the monastery, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m not Carmelite anymore.” It was like being displaced. All of a sudden—
I loved my vows, so I wasn’t grieving the loss of the vows because I felt filled with the beloved. I grieved later, many different losses, but it wouldn’t have made sense to stay. There was no fit anymore.
It was almost as though part of why I was there was to realize in my body and in my mind what’s possible as a human being, and to bring that out in service—to be of service so that others can, within their very lifestyles, taste and know that they can live from that place. Because I may be very esoteric, but I’m very practical too.
So I left without the storyline—this happened and that happened—and I could acknowledge that they were all involved because the story was the human story and the Divine story, but it was a soul move.
“It was a soul move.”
Rick: It was an inner calling, just as an inner calling had gotten you there in the first place.
Kimberly: Yeah, and fortunately for me, when I have inspirations like that, everything lines up. I got a scholarship to do my seminary training, and I ended up landing in an international program. So it situated me with the broad worldview that I needed because I was in Washington, D.C., for 9/11.
To come from all my solitude and then be immersed in all that chaos, I was really provided for by being with all these people from all over the world.
Rick: Did you get a lot of resistance from your fellow sisters in the monastery when you—both there and in North Dakota—when they heard you were thinking of leaving? Did they say, “Oh, you’re going crazy, you’re going off the beam, come to your senses, stay here”? That kind of thing?
Kimberly: The leaders, yeah. The main thing was, “I’m on my way to hell.”
Rick: How is hell treating you now? Do you like it?
Kimberly: I’ve met a lot of great people here.
Rick: Yes, yes, I’m in the large pool now. I saw a funny cartoon the other day. There was this guy who was new to hell, and the devil was saying to him, “So we’ve kind of given up on the fire and brimstone thing. We’ve covered the floor with Legos.”
Kimberly: Yeah. And then there was really great grieving. The prioress up in North Dakota, whom I was especially close with, was deeply grieving. You know, Rick, I got it. When I knew I was going to let everyone know, I would have been surprised if I had been met—if the conversation would have been one that we would have walked away from.
She was grieving because I was such a fit. I am such a contemplative. I mean, I was like a fish in water, and usually when somebody leaves, it’s because they’re not contemplative in that way. Her big grieving was that God was losing a warrior and somebody else was winning.
So there was a lot of—some of my fellow sisters, you know, we didn’t get to talk much because of the rules, and I would have loved that. I miss some of them greatly.
Rick: And you can’t really correspond with them now and tell them how you’re doing and everything, right? They’re not even likely to watch this interview. They probably don’t have computers and stuff.
Kimberly: As far as I know, I wasn’t welcome. I have been banned from different things. I wasn’t technically banned, but there was incredible pressure that I was a bad influence.
Rick: Yeah, sure.
Kimberly: That I wasn’t welcome.
Rick: Yeah, well, it kind of threatens what they’re doing. If you’re going to leave and you seem to be happy about it—and you’re happy even after having done it—then others there may begin to think, “Well, geez, maybe I’d be happy, and she seems to be doing okay.” So it kind of jeopardizes the whole structure.
Kimberly: Well, even think of my theology. I mean, if I was in contact where spirit is leading me—
Rick: Kashmir Shaivism.
Kimberly: —it would open up all sorts of unacceptable dialogues.
Rick: Yeah. You know, there’s that term “spiritual but not religious.” I bet you would still say that you were spiritual and religious, but I bet you would—not to put words in your mouth—say, “Well, yeah, but my religiosity is just a much bigger basket now and includes everything.”
Yeah, I think it’s true because I think there’s a place for the container, and for me, religion in its best form is a container for us to experience the ineffable.
Kimberly: Yeah, I think it’s true because I think there’s a place for the container, and for me, religion in its best form is a container for us to experience the ineffable.
So I think there’s a strong part of me—I’m not not Catholic. I’m not Christian, only according to the way it’s framed.
Rick: Right. Neither is Jesus, for that matter.
Kimberly: Yeah, but the Christian-ness and the Catholic-ness are so in my cells.
Rick: Sure. It was your channel, the route you took, your upbringing.
Kimberly: Yeah, and I feel very blessed, Rick, because I so understand the woundedness so many people are moving through. Not that I haven’t had things I needed to grieve or heal, but for the most part, because my experience has been this love affair with God, I feel really, really grateful for all my experiences.
Even at times when observance in religion has been oppressive or unethical or rigid, it’s been an opportunity for me to touch into the essence of the person who was wielding that sword, to have compassion. So I feel really, really blessed that I think my early childhood experiences have left me with that kind of inner stability.
Rick: Yeah, definitely marching to the beat of your own drummer, but not meandering erratically around the marching field. You definitely have a purpose and a direction that seems good.
Kimberly: Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you for seeing that and saying that. I appreciate it, out here as this freelance mystic.
🛤️ Many paths, many forms of intelligence
Rick: Personally, I think that all religious and spiritual people should study a little bit of astronomy. Firstly, you’ll get over the notion that the universe is only 6,000 years old. That one ends pretty quick.
But then, if you can contemplate, according to most estimates, how many civilizations there probably are in our galaxy alone and then how many galaxies there are, it gives you a much deeper appreciation for the greatness of divine intelligence. It also pops you out of any narrow way of thinking you may have in terms of, “My way is the right way.”
God is not a one-trick pony. The universe is this vast, diverse play and display of infinite intelligence, with as many paths to God as there are beings.
“God is not a one-trick pony.”
Kimberly: I love that. I was very moved, in its concept, by a book called The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle. It’s his doctoral dissertation. He’s vegan, and his passion has been a harmonious relationship with all of the world—plants, animals, everything.
One of his chapters is called “Intelligence of the Species.” One of my takeaways from it was that we have a really rudimentary idea of what it means to be intelligent, and we form this construct that sets us up to say, “This is the way we grow in intelligence. This is what intelligence is like. This gives us our measure system.”
But in it is an egocentricity that keeps us hemmed in and blinds us from exactly what you’re saying: that there could be many, many ways that intelligence is actually happening. I even love some of the movies that are coming out that are challenging that. Arrival is one of them.
Rick: Oh, I love that movie.
Kimberly: Yes, I know. It’s an incredible movie.
Rick: I watched it a couple of times.
Kimberly: Me too.
Rick: It gave me goosebumps.
Kimberly: Oh, I know, and Amy Adams was amazing in that movie, too. So I’m 100% on board with you on that, and I think that’s one of the adventures.
When I was little, and when I had that experience in my book about the autumn leaves, I realized that that is what my life was about: being and becoming in God.
Rick: Do you want to tell us that thing? Most people here haven’t read your book.
Kimberly: Sure, sure. So we lived in Cincinnati, and we lived close to school. It was a time when everybody felt safe to walk to and from school, so I loved walking home in the autumn.
Rick: You had to be at school.
Kimberly: Yes, and I loved everything about the fall because I loved school. I was very, very nerdy that way, and I loved autumn.
It was one of those days walking home when you could tell autumn had definitely happened. The air had changed. Everything had kind of quickened up, the wind was quickening up, the leaves had begun to turn, and there was that very mild, mild chill in the air that told you everything was changing. You could smell it, and I loved it.
I would walk home, and from time to time I would get caught up in feeling the dance of nature. It felt like it was going on all around me, and all of nature was inviting me to the dance. So I would actually, like a dervish, whirl home. I would whirl all the way home.
One of these times that I whirled home, I stopped at the end of the cul-de-sac where we lived. I was breathing it in because I was in such a deep place of bliss. As I opened my eyes, a tree across the street caught my attention. It lit up.
Then one leaf lit up on that tree. The leaf had turned colors and was kind of going back and forth like this. You could tell it was going to leave its branch. I was taken into that leaf, and as I was feeling one with that leaf, the leaf broke off and began to swirl toward the ground.
Out of nowhere, when that leaf dropped, sadness—really deep existential sadness—arose within me. This unspoken question, “Is that what life is about, dying?” came, and sadness just filled me.
But at the very moment that that happened, because I was in such a vulnerable, open state, time stopped. It was as if everything pulled back these veils, and I had this direct experience that that leaf was in God and God was in that leaf.
The translation, since I was projecting onto the leaf, was the experience of me: that I am in God and God is in me, and that’s all life is. That’s it.
What struck me about that experience was that the movement of events filled me with so much joy that the sadness was washed away forever. All the traces of it were completely gone, and it was within that framework that everything has evolved for me.
“That leaf was in God and God was in that leaf.”
So I always felt like, well, that’s all life is about. It feels like I have this awesome chocolate cake, and I just want to share it with everybody. I know that sounds very evangelical, but it’s kind of like, “Oh my God, this is the best cake ever. You’ve got to eat it!” So that’s my attitude.
Rick: Well, it’s a lot better than those little wafers they make you eat, right?
Kimberly: Yeah, totally. What I love about it as well, which I think is really important in understanding our growth as human beings, is that we’re complicated. We can have these ineffable experiences and still mature into them, and still have the journey.
When I was 19, actually right as I was coming out of that dark night, everything had happened and everything had changed, and I was having the dramatic experiences. I was at a healing mass and I got slain in the spirit, which is where a healer puts their hands on you and you’re whooshed and you fall over.
I was brought back to that moment. What’s interesting about that moment is that when I was 19 and it happened again, there was this experience of Christ’s presence standing beside me. There was also the experience that the sadness that had welled up was the sadness of having lost my grandma when I was three, whom I was very close to, and almost losing my mom when I was four.
Those experiences impacted me deeply, and I was carrying them in a cellular way and in my psyche. When I was five and had the experience, I didn’t even process that. I could have this deep, moving, illuminating experience and then have it be the place and the way that I could hold the sadness that needed to be healed when it was ready to come forward.
In that moment, when I was 19, I wept the losses that had happened when I was little. So I think it’s such a teaching to me about our complexity as human beings.
Rick: Yeah, you’ve had some interesting breakthroughs. Some people have fairly mundane journeys, and some people have these dramatic ones with all kinds of flashy breakthroughs.
Kimberly: It’s so true. I told somebody, “I don’t need to take drugs. Life is kind of psychedelic already.”
Rick: Yeah, never a dull moment. But people shouldn’t be envious. I mean, I was on plenty of long meditation courses, and people would get up and talk about all these flashy experiences. I would say, “Yeah, why aren’t I experiencing something like that?”
But we’re all wired differently, and some people are flashy-experience types and some aren’t. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re more advanced or closer to enlightenment or anything. I don’t think so, anyway.
Kimberly: I don’t think so, either. Knowing myself and all the ways I’m growing, I feel pretty confident in saying it’s not so.
One of the things I love to do, Rick, when I’m working with people in groups or one-on-one is to provide the opportunity for people to taste that brilliant, illuminative part of themselves.
Oftentimes, because of the stressors that people are holding in their minds and their views of themselves, some of what’s really flashy and incredible that’s going on is missed. They’re just not letting themselves taste it. They’re not letting their minds and hearts and bodies go there.
I love to actually celebrate other people, and then they walk away and feel it so much that they’re taken away from looking outside themselves to what somebody else may have to offer them.
Looking within and the mystic adventure
Rick: Interesting. I don’t know whether it was you or somebody else, or something else I was reading or listening to, about the thing of looking outside, looking outside, looking outside, and then kind of hitting up against the wall and being turned around 180 degrees. I’m sure you’ve had this, but there was some interesting story around this that I just read recently.
Kimberly: Right. I think it would make sense. Again, I don’t know physics well. I dabble in all these different complementary fields related to what I do, and I probably am a little biased in pulling from them what supports my worldview a little bit.
Rick: Yeah, we all do. It drives the physicists crazy—all these New Agey types co-opting quantum mechanics.
Kimberly: I know, so true. If you look back at some of the even more ancient texts and you look at the energy construct of a human being, there’s the postulation that, as human beings, we are the microcosm of the macrocosm, and that there’s real relevance to “as within, so without.”
I think what is brilliant about hitting against the limitation of the “without” part is that it’s so logical to look without. It’s so logical to say, “Well, I’m a muddy mess; let me look to a teacher. Well, I’m not the source of all; let me look to a practice.”
Rick: Right, and in so doing relinquish my own autonomy and my own good sense.
Kimberly: Yeah, for sure. Then to hit the limitation and to have the devastation of falling short of the expectations that that’s meant to be our all turns us to ask another question and to open to the possibility of experiencing that we might be within the very microcosm of the macrocosm.
That would mean that ultimately our own evolution will only come about if we look within, and it dismantles the egocentrism.
Rick: Yeah. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said an interesting thing one time. He said, “God may be omnipotent, but the one thing he cannot do is remove himself from your heart,” because obviously, if God is omnipresent, then he’s in your heart.
So perhaps within oneself, within one’s own heart, or however you want to phrase it, is the easiest place to find God first. Then maybe later on we’ll find him everywhere. But why not start from where we are?
Kimberly: I love that, I love that. And yeah, let that begin to inform how we find it in other places.
Rick: Yeah.
Kimberly: Right. I love this notion of playing with the guru idea, and I want to do something really fun one year and walk around holding mirrors everywhere I go—a mirror campaign.
Rick: In the Christian and other traditional literatures of the world, there’s a lot of mention of angels and gods and devas and ascended masters and all sorts of beings, enlightened or more evolved beings that dwell in subtler or higher realms, and you’ve had some experiences of this sort of thing. To what extent do you think that that is all relevant to and instrumental in people’s spiritual development?
Kimberly: I think it’s integral to be interfacing with the possibility of that. I think that everyone is going to have a different level at which it’s helpful to their own growth. For me, I’m very relationship-like, not only as a woman but just as a lover archetype. I’ve gotten to know my personality, and I love feeling connected and supported. I flourish and support others when I feel that as well.
So, for me, being really open to the fact that I’ve got friends in all these realms, and to experience them actually helping me and showing up in that, is huge for me surrendering even more to the unknown. I don’t know that everybody needs that, but I do think it’s really integral to be exploring the possibility.
I’ve always found, too, as I work with people from all different traditions, that it’s very interesting how people will have experiences of the beings in their traditions, which says something to me about the plane-of-consciousness piece. Somebody who might be really open to goddess presences might not be open to angels, and somebody who might be really open to Jesus might not be open at all to an experience of an ascended master of another lineage.
I don’t know that there’s a right or a wrong with that, but I think it’s incredibly important to be developing an openness in knowing ourselves and having a relationship there.
Rick: It could also be that the divine kind of orchestrates things such that we experience these presences in forms that will be comfortable or familiar to us. Someone who’s an ardent Christian would get a little freaked out if all of a sudden the Buddha showed up, or some naked sadhu or something.
Kimberly: Totally, right. You might even think, “Well, then somehow we’re constructing it.” I think there could be some truth to that. I think that by our way of being open and not open, we form a subjective relationship with all of those realms.
Rick: Yeah, it’s not necessarily that we’re constructing it. I mean, let’s say that we’re all looking at a statue and there are ten of us, and we each have totally different-colored glasses on. Each of us is seeing the very same statue in different colors.
So it could be that these impulses or energies, or whatever they are, are just filtered through our particular lens or glasses, if you will, in a way that makes sense to us. They even say sometimes, after people die, that they initially go to a place that makes sense in terms of the belief system that they had during life, and then maybe later on they’re shown that there’s a more universal picture.
Kimberly: I believe that, and thank you. Much better put.
Rick: But it’s interesting, and it’s also interesting that some people who are very spiritual completely deny the existence of any such thing and think that it’s all a lot of fantasizing. I don’t happen to agree with them, but to each their own.
Kimberly: Yeah, for sure. How objective can we be? How objectively can we hold a stance with realms that are definitely more than what we know?
Rick: The reason I find it interesting, though, is that although it can be indulged in, and there are people who get really into channeling and ascended masters and all that without really being very concerned about self-realization or their own personal evolution or enlightenment, I kind of have this sort of definition of spiritual development as being inclusive of all possibilities. Really, not just knowing the essence, but knowing the full package of how everything works—all realms, all levels, the whole universe, top to bottom, core to branches, or whatever.
Kimberly: Yeah, I love that, too. I’m very similar to you. I remember even when I was about seven, I realized that I didn’t want adventures that would end. I didn’t want this feeling of coming to the conclusion of something in the bigger sense, not in the small sense.
Again, I think that was part and parcel with—part of it is the expansive parts of who and what I am as a personality, the spirit-led part, and part of it was, “Oh, I had losses, and I don’t like losses, so I don’t want things to end.” So it’s fueled by a lot of things, but that is compelling to me: the thought that this adventure in these mystic realms, as I like to call them, isn’t going to end. You’re not going to get to a place where you go, “I got it now. I got it.”
Rick: I was just thinking of the little kid in the back of the car saying, “Are we there yet?” I mean, there is no “there.”
Kimberly: Totally, yeah. Right, right.
Rick: I think it’s funny, but I’m sure there are people listening who disagree with me right now. I think it’s more realistic, actually, to the way things are set up. Some people I respect a heck of a lot tend to agree with me, like Adyashanti and others, that there is, as far as we can see, no endpoint to this game.
Kimberly: Right, and I’m so on with that that I love to correlate it with the sensibility. If you think of children, like they’re playing on the playground and they’re having a great time, if you can recall a time when—well, I can do it in adult circumstances, too, but our childhood memories sometimes are easier to look back on—and you’re just lost in all that playing, that’s what I feel is this mystic adventure.
It’s that qualitative piece. You build a sandcastle and you push it over and you start over, and then you run to the swing, and there isn’t this getting tired of playing.
Part of where we set up limitations, from what I find as adults, is that we set the end goal. We want to feel that we’re going to arrive as a human being at a certain point of illumination. But if we tap back into the qualitative nature of our being as an evolutionary being, then we can develop the inner stability to maintain that quality of life in all we’re doing, and then having an endpoint becomes irrelevant.
Rick: Yeah, and not having one doesn’t mean that you’re never going to be fulfilled, because some people might have the concept, “Well, I’m not going to be happy until I reach this endpoint.” So it doesn’t mean that you’re never going to be happy, because the goal is all along the path, so to speak. Fulfillment can be very copious and complete, and yet there’s still unfoldment, there’s still development, there’s still refinement.
Kimberly: There is, and I’m massacring this reference, but you can look it up and get a better read. There’s an old book called, I think, Ten Cosmic Powers. It’s a Tantric text, and the third one in there—all the powers are feminine—the third one is the Tripura Sundari.
Rick: Oh, yeah. I just interviewed a woman a few weeks ago, Kavitha Chinnaiyan, about the ten Mahavidyas, so people can look that up. We went through these, but go ahead. Go on and say what you’re going to say.
Kimberly: Well, I think what speaks to what you’re sharing is that that power is the realization—I’m going to use God terms—that we, as God, are God’s desire and God’s fulfillment at the very same time. To actually realize that power, as we are that, is where that comes to with the endpoint. We’re fulfilled because we are that desire, but we’re continuing to magnify and evolve and expand and become.
Rick: Speaking of God, we’ve been speaking about God a lot. Some traditions speak of God consciousness, a state in which one actually meets God or cognizes God or comes to know God in a much more tangible way than any sort of belief or concept. What do you have to say about that possibility?
Kimberly: Well, I think I have a non-answer to it in some ways. In having experiences as a Catholic, there was the experience of God, and I would say that’s where I grew and transformed in that. It was a direct experience of God.
Rick: And how did you know it was God, and what was it like?
Kimberly: A field of freedom, and the freedom is the operative word, because I would want to use the word love, but love feels too relational, too conditional and emotional. In that freedom was the fullness of thought, but not thought here, and that was in an experience of God.
But within those experiences, my experience of God doesn’t happen that way at all anymore, because that point of experience is gone. The experience of it has done away with that distance.
Rick: So this is not so much an I-Thou relationship anymore as a sort of unitive relationship.
Kimberly: A unitive, right. Not that there aren’t distinctions within me and my experiences, but it’s shifted dramatically.
I really esteem, especially for the Western psyche, a healthy surrendering into a direct experience of God or God consciousness, because somehow, however we’re wired or set up as Westerners, we seem to do well when we surrender into that. But it would lead to the dissolution of that; it wouldn’t lead to it becoming the thing.
Rick: Yeah, there’s an age-old debate in Hinduism between the Vaishnavites and the Vedantins. The Vaishnavites call them the Mayavadins, because the Vaishnavites want to have this I-Thou relationship and ever be a devotee of God and enjoy the bliss of that devotion, whereas the others are more into just achieving complete unification.
Shankara resolved it in a way. He said the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion. So there’s sort of the appreciation of the unity of life and, at the same time, within that, some diversity which can stir up waves of devotion.
Kimberly: Yes, I love that. I love the language you just used for that. That speaks very much to where I’m at. I can give an example, a recent example, too, where it’s fun to still play in the I-Thou realms.
I was attending a retreat with the Brahma Kumaris in New York, and they had awesome different little meditative experiences that they led.
Rick: What are they?
Kimberly: Oh, Brahma Kumaris. It’s an Indian order. The founder, who’s ninety-three, is still alive. I don’t know if it’s all women, but this happened to be all women. Sister Jenna has a show called America Meditating, and she had me on back during my book tour. So I knew of them and knew them, and they’re brilliant women.
You talk about women who are solitary mystics and yet in community—very brilliant. In this one, we did a puja where we had two circles, one of the more traditional ones where, you know, the inside and the outside, you’re facing, and you partner up for things.
She led us, with eyes downcast, to feel bubbling consciousness within ourselves and then bubbling it out our eyes. As we bubbled it out our eyes, we lifted the gaze as consciousness to the one before us, and it was incredibly moving.
I think that gives a great example of the I-Thou still being relevant, still being a playground where we can be explorers and adventurers without creating a dualism around consciousness and the unitive nature of reality.
Rick: Nice, good. Well, so let’s talk a little bit about what you do and what people can do if they want to connect with you, what you have to offer them, and so on.
Kimberly’s work and resources
Kimberly: I would love that. Thank you, Rick. So, everyone listening, first of all, you can email me anytime. I am a very relational person.
Rick: Kimberly@…
Kimberly: Kimberly@kimberlybraun.com.
Rick: Okay.
Kimberly: If you go to my website, which is my name, KimberlyBraun.com, you can find a pathway to reach me as well. I do private sessions, and I have a number of retreats that you could join. I am launching a flagship course, an eight-week deep dive, and I’m sending out videos starting on Monday.
If you’d like to be added to that list, you can get four free videos: three that are 25 minutes long, and the last one is 45 minutes. They’re a bit of a taste of what it would be like if you wanted to attend something with me, work with me, or bring your gifts. You could also just enjoy them; they’re free explorations.
Rick: Sure, and if somebody is watching this two years from now, this particular thing won’t be relevant. But you can still come to your website, and you’ll have other things going on.
Kimberly: Come to my website, yes, because, Rick, I’m moving into the online world much more these days. I still offer retreats, but I’m livestreaming a lot of my workshops. I’ll be leading a Tantra of Christ workshop that will livestream in March. I’ll be teaching down in Sedona at the end of March, and I’ll be teaching in San Diego.
We’ll be offering an immersion in Teresa of Avila’s writings, and we’ll also be creating some unique chants based on her writings. My girlfriend is a great singer, and I chant as well.
So if you want to get in touch with me, go to KimberlyBraun.com and join my newsletter. You’ll get a download of the e-book, and we’ll be in touch. I can send you information, and you can contact me through the email address. You can give me a call at 941-284-3036, and I will always have more to offer.
I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing now, out of the monastery, for 17 years, and I think I’m just beginning to chip away at the beginning of my role and my play here on Earth.
Rick: Great. Well, it’s inspiring, and it kind of inspires optimism that there are people like you doing what you’re doing, and many such people all around the world. It kind of makes one feel that we’re going to make it on this planet.
Kimberly: I have just loved the conversation with you, Rick. I thank you for your reflections, and thank you for just following the organic movement of the conversation. I love that. I feel that was very inspired, and I definitely have a lot to take away myself.
Rick: Good. So let me just make a couple of quick wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Kimberly Braun, and I’ll be putting up a page on BatGap.com, as I always do, about this interview, with links to her website and links to her book and so forth. Perhaps that page will be updated over the years if she writes new books and everything.
Most of you watching this are probably familiar with BatGap, but if you aren’t, just go there and check out the menus, and you’ll see what there is to see. It’s pretty obvious. This exists as an audio podcast in addition to the videos. There’s a Facebook group where people discuss the various interviews, and anyway, there are links to all these things on the site.
There’s also a geographic index where you can find events that are happening in your area, offered by the people I’ve interviewed, and we’ll be telling Kimberly about that so she can register hers.
Kimberly: Great.
Rick: So thanks, Kimberly.
Kimberly: Thank you so much. I’m so honored.
Rick: Yeah, we’ll be in touch. It’s been a lot of fun.
Kimberly: It has been a lot of fun, and thank you all for listening. I send you much love, and I haven’t met you, but I love you.
Rick: And maybe you will meet many of them soon.
Kimberly: Yes.
Rick: Good.
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